jus' do som'n random

FROM March 8, 2005

My assessment of the weekend, perhaps a bit overblown but certainly genuine, is that if I were fully immersed in the inchoate culture of grimeland 2005 right now, I would be heading up Rock Steady Crew UK and, ahermmm, innovating the third element on the dancefloor. This conclusion was built on empirical evidence. This is not my ego expanding; this is my physical reaction to the transatlantic echoes of a living font.

I spent hours (too many to recount here) fixated on Brooklyn Cable Access Television (BCAT) and its offerings of Madonna's "Lucky Star" and Janet Jackson's "Control" on a video program called Flashbacks. Before hip-hop ate the world, Madonna was dictating cool through modern jazz, a precocious sequence of now-too-slow hops and fan kicks and pas de bourres. She winks off-camera seven times in the video. Janet's moves have fared a little better with time; apart from copious The Snakes, she drops the prototype for the Missy bounce, the shoulder-snap that would become the house move for Timbaland disciples.

How can we take this video shit to the next level, so to speak, after Missy's throwback b-girl videos and DeVyne's post-b-boy butter smooths? Dave Elsewhere, that sideshow of a triple-jointed popper, is being cast in commercials after making You Got Served*; can The Neptunes please hire 33 Fainting Spells or, better, Donna Uchizono for their next cinematic opuses?

So I made up a dance in my living room to the Lady Sovereign song "Random (Menta Original Mix)," and let me just say, it puts me on some crazy moves I've never done before.

*Of which there will be a SEQUEL, so sayeth Omarion!! !!!!!! !!!!!!!! !!